Time and the Other: Waiting and Hope among Irregular Migrants

Bendixsen, Synnøve; Eriksen, Thomas Hylland

doi:10.4324/9781003085317-4

Cited by 27 publications

(28 citation statements)

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“…At the same time, due to the closure of all the public institutions, immigration paperwork was on hold, which meant some of the new foreign workers became even more 'stuck.' Indeed, there is often nothing more detrimental than the duree of hopeful waiting for documents to be done and escaping the legal limbo of an in-between space (Bendixsen and Eriksen 2018).…”

Section: It's Political: the Indefinite Everydaymentioning

confidence: 99%

Anxious immobilities: an ethnography of coping with contagion (Covid-19) in Macau

Zuev

Hannam

2020

Mobilities

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In February 2020, Macau became one of the first regions where the pandemic of coronavirus or Covid-19 affected the totality of social and economic life leading to increased anxieties over movement and distance. Although Macau has had very few actual cases of the virus-46 in totaland no deaths from it, the Macau government rapidly instituted a lockdown. The aim of this article is to reflect on how the social experience of being in lockdown can provide insights into understanding the type of experience or condition that we provisionally term 'anxious immobility.' Such a condition is characterized by a total disruption of everyday rhythms and specifically anxious waiting for the normalization of activity while being the subject of biosocial narratives of quarantine and socially responsible. The paper is based upon 3 months of ethnographic research conducted by two researchers based in Macau. We also reflect upon some aspects of the politics of mobilities in the light of disruptions and friction points between Hong Kong, Macau, mainland China, and the rest of the world.

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Section: It's Political: the Indefinite Everydaymentioning

confidence: 99%

Anxious immobilities: an ethnography of coping with contagion (Covid-19) in Macau

Zuev

Hannam

2020

Mobilities

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“…It is a making an object of oneself (Sartre's “bad faith”), but, as Kwon shows, this object‐ness is itself an active positioning. Elsewhere, migrants waiting for refugee status fill their time with projects aimed at self‐improvement—hardly a passive time (Bendixsen and Eriksen 2018). Here, “waiting” is filled with productive activity aimed at the realization of a future moment, a future becoming.…”

Section: Anticipation and Becomingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Wait and the Sky Will Change: Anticipation and Revolution in Northeastern Thailand

Johnson

2020

American Anthropologist

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Wait, and the sky will change its color" is a saying that, in Thai, points toward a future that will erase the unbearable present. But what does it mean to wait? In Northeastern Thailand, I explore this experience of holding the present in tension with an uncertain future via examples drawn from religious upheaval, political revolution, and the lives of migrant workers. Waiting on that which never comes, in this context, is neither nihilism nor escapism, but allows for the opening a space of fantasy-the imaginative horizon that allows a rethinking of the everyday. [anticipation, millenarianism, imagination, waiting, migrant labor, Thailand] RESUMEN "Espere, y el cielo cambiará su color" es un decir que señala un futuro que borrará el presente insufrible. Pero, ¿que significa esperar? En el nororiente de Tailandia, exploro esta experiencia de sostener el presente en tensión con un futuro incierto a través de ejemplos sacados de la turbulencia religiosa, la revolución política y las vidas de los trabajadores migrantes. Esperando lo que nunca llega, en este contexto, no es nihilismo ni escapismo, sino que permite el abrir un espacio de fantasía-el horizonte imaginativo que permite un repensar del día a día-. [anticipación, milenarismo, imaginación, la espera, labor migrante, Tailandia]

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“…The 'incitement to wait, to be patient' (Povinelli, 2011: 190) is central to how power is organized in such processes of bordering (see also Hage, 2009). Several scholars have highlighted migrants' experiences and negotiations of waiting (Bendixen and Eriksen, 2018;Griffiths, 2014;Rotter, 2016) and explored the production of suspended futures through border controls, regularization schemes and labour regulations (Andersson, 2014;Barber and Lem, 2018;Bryan, 2018;Saetermo, 2018). Yet, while migration scholars have explored how migrants relate to uncertain future promises and how these articulate with neoliberal economic and demographic imperatives (Barber and Lem, 2018), there has been less research on the topic that interests me here.…”

Section: Bordering Waiting and Temporalitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Waiting as a redemptive state: The ‘Lampedusa in Hamburg’ and the offer from the Hamburg government

Drangsland

2019

Time & Society

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This paper explores an offer of possible legalization that the Hamburg government gave to a group of 350 illegalized West-African migrants in 2013. Based on ethnographic fieldwork carried out in 2017, when the majority of the migrants who accepted the offer were still awaiting its redeeming, I explore the offer as an instrument of governing and as a lived timespace. Taking this route, this article seeks to contribute to the debate of waiting and the relation between time, space and government in present border regimes. In particular, I argue for the need to pay attention to how waiting, as a technique of governing migrants, works through linear and periodized temporal frameworks. Drawing on feminist critiques of temporal linearity and periodization, and on Povinelli's (2011) work on techniques of 'temporal bracketing', I investigate how violence and redeeming are coordinated spatially and temporally in the offer. I argue that temporal frameworks intertwine with territorial imaginaries in ways that allow waiting to appear as redemptive state. Moreover, I suggest that by attending to multiple and relational temporalities, the coordinates of suffering and redeeming in the offer might be redrawn.

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Time and the Other: Waiting and Hope among Irregular Migrants

Cited by 27 publications

References 1 publication

Anxious immobilities: an ethnography of coping with contagion (Covid-19) in Macau

Anxious immobilities: an ethnography of coping with contagion (Covid-19) in Macau

Wait and the Sky Will Change: Anticipation and Revolution in Northeastern Thailand

Waiting as a redemptive state: The ‘Lampedusa in Hamburg’ and the offer from the Hamburg government

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